This “unashamed mash note”:http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/bill_emmott/2007/04/not_decline_but_rupture_with_t.html from Bill Emmott, former editor of the _Economist_ presents a class of a triple-distilled tincture of the prevailing globollocks on Sarkozy’s victory in France. You don’t need to read the actual column to get the gist; just the Pavlovian dinner-bell talking points that it strings together.

France … paralyzed by powerful interest groups … political elite … beholden … or … afraid … takes a brave outsider … precisely Sarkozy’s appeal … Reagan or a Thatcher … A “rupture” is what France needs … showing that his country is not doomed to decline … cadres of highly globalized managers … etc … etc

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I tend to regard myself as Crooked Timber’s online myrmidon of a number of rather unpopular views; among other things, as regular readers will have seen, I believe that the incitement to religious hatred legislation was a good idea (perhaps badly executed), that John Searle has it more or less correct on the subject of artificial intelligence, that Jacques Derrida deserves his high reputation and that George Orwell was not even in the top three essayists of the twentieth century[1]. I’m a fan of Welsh nationalism. Oh yes, the Kosovo intervention was a crock too. At some subconscious level I am aware that my ideas about education are both idiotic and unspeakable. But I think that all of these causes are regarded as at least borderline sane by at least one fellow CT contributor. There is only one major issue on which I stand completely alone, reviled by all. And it’s this; Budweiser (by which I mean the real Budweiser, the beer which has been sold under that brand by Anheuser-Busch since 1876) is really quite a good beer. I have been threatening this post in comments for a while now, and here it is:
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I’ve recently been blogging about the inadequacy of cultural explanations of national differences, but was struck by this “aside”:http://blogs.ft.com/rachmanblog/2007/05/tony_blairs_far.html by Gideon Rachman on Tony Blair’s farewell speech.

I really hated the bit when he declared that Britain is “the greatest nation on earth.” This struck me as a very unBritish statement. My faith in my fellow countrymen was, however, restored by the fact that this declaration was greeted with lukewarm applause, rather than whoops and standing ovations.

It’s true as best as I can see it, and it does make Britain quite different from other countries. Try getting away with a major speech in the US that doesn’t have some bumptious language about national greatness. France is the same I believe (albeit with a different language of triumphalism). Even Ireland has its passive-aggressive equivalent of _gloire nationale_; I read somewhere or another that there was a myth that Ireland had a special dispensation from the times of tribulation preceding the Day of Judgement because of its unsullied guardianship of the Christian virtues – the entire country would slide under the waves before the Antichrist got up to speed. But not Britain. My vague memories of reading Linda Colley’s work a decade or more ago (it surely talks about this _in extenso_) is that this wasn’t always the case. However, it certainly is now. Anyone up to date with speculations as to the reason why British nationalism doesn’t trumpet its virtues? My working hypothesis, which is open to revision or refutation, is that it’s a subtle form of Bourdieuvian one-upmanship along the lines of the “ironic gnome rule”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/11/the-ironic-gnome-rule/, expressing the belief that anyone who has to proclaim their national greatness by definition doesn’t possess it.

Over at Eugene’s lair, “Ilya Somin”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_05_06-2007_05_12.shtml#1178681057 opines on Mario Puzo’s original novel of _The Godfather_, and the sociology of the Italian and American mafias.

Puzo recognized, as sociologist Diego Gambetta explained more systematically, that the Sicilian Mafia flourished because it provided better “protection” against crime and violations of property and contract rights than did the official authorities, who generally protected only the politically powerful elite.

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Via “Unfogged”:http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2007_05_06.html#006758, a “hall of fame note”:http://istherenosininit.wordpress.com/2007/05/07/most-outrageous-note-evar/ from a student:

Dear Prof. AWB,

I was in your British Literature class in the fall of 2006, and for that class, you gave me a grade of C. I need to have a better grade for this class. As far as I know, I got an 86 on the first paper, and I didn’t complete the second assignment. I don’t know what I got on the final essay or exam.

I would like for you to change my grade to at least a B. If this means I must complete the second assignment, I will attempt to set aside time to do so. Please address this matter immediately.

Thank you,

Bwahahaha! Actually, just this morning a colleague got an email from a student saying that he would “try to set aside time” to take the final (the time for which has been posted on the University’s website all year).

.. but actually I find this pretty funny:

(From yesterday’s Bay area NYTimes.)

Thanks (if that’s the right word) to Dan Hardie for sending me to this dispiriting item on a new City Academy in Peterborough:

Britain’s most expensive state school is being built without a playground because those running it believe that pupils should be treated like company employees and do not need unstructured play time.
The authorities at the £46.4m Thomas Deacon city academy in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, due to open this autumn, also believe that the absence of a playground will avoid the risk of “uncontrollable” numbers of children running around in breaks at the 2,200-pupil school.

If you think children don’t need unstructured playtime you need to get out of the business of schooling. If your school is so big that the numbers of children would be uncontrollable when they are in unstructured play then your school is too big! (Long promised post on school size in works, honest).

However:

[Pupils] will be able to hydrate during the learning experience

What a relief.

Americans: don’t gloat, it’s happening here too.

Gentlemen, in the 1960’s, representations of octopi in comics often bordered on the faintly ridiculous.

Having lately received my handsome copy of The Octopi and the Ocean [click through for preview], I am happy to report that the contemporary situation is much improved.

“One day, two monogamously dedicated archaeological octopi recovered an ancient artifact from the timeless ocean floor. The artifact was the power of true marriages. When activated by an inseparable pair, the two would be endowed with a certain unstoppable positive energy.” In the event, a small boy is called upon to etc. etc.

Here’s an interview with the author: “It’s actually the fastest thing I’ve ever done, other than some stuff I did faster.”

If PZ Myers doesn’t have a copy, he really should order one.

Jeff Weintraub says this is not a parody.

And the nominations for ‘best performance as a concern troll of the week’ go to – aw, hell with it. I clicked a link, taking me to this Michael Medved column. Don’t get me started. But then I did actually go to find the Rasmussen results he was citing. They are here:

Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure.

Republicans reject that view and, by a 7-to-1 margin, say the President did not know in advance about the attacks. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 18% believe the President knew and 57% take the opposite view.

Back to Medved: he is wringing his hands about the Dem numbers. But it is actually quite astonishing that 1 in 8 Republicans are, by implication, supporters of an organization that they believe significantly sponsors terrorism, since it sponsors Bush. (Knowing in advance and doing nothing would be aiding and abetting, at best, I take it.) By contrast, presumably the 35% of Dems who think Bush was in the know at least disapprove of the 9/11 attacks?

The meta point here is that I never post about numbers stuff because I have no expertise. It seems to me it is always the case that at least 20% of respondents have very strange views, or must have failed to understand the question, or – perhaps most likely of all – were taking the occasion of being asked the question to vent angrily.

What do you make of these poll numbers?

UPDATE: It seems like a significant problem with the question that ‘incompetently failed to act on warnings about the possibility of’ could be construed as ‘knew about in advance’.

Erik Olin Wright has a nice short piece on his website forthcoming in the UK left-of-centre magazine Soundings, called Guidelines for Envisioning Real Utopias. It is a very useful outline and discussion of the rules we ought to observe when trying to come up with better institutional alternatives to the status quo, viz:

1. Evaluate alternatives in terms of three criteria: desirability, viability, achievability.
2. Do not let the problem of achievability dictate the discussion of viability.
3. Clarify the problem of winners and losers in structural transformation.
4. Identify normative trade-offs in institutional designs and the transition costs in their creation.
5. Analyze alternatives in terms of waystations and intermediary forms as well as destinations. Pay particular attention to the potential of waystations to open up virtuous cycles of transformation.

Although any of our readers will find it interesting, I especially recommend it to, and request comment from, the political philosophers and theorists who think of themselves as doing, or interested in, non-ideal theory.

This is a very simple summer dessert from Katie Stewart’s Times Cookery Book. My mother made it twice in the seventies, and the memory lingered till she finally donated one of her two copies of Katie Stewart to me a couple of years ago. It’s as good as I remembered it being.

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Via “Andrew Gelman,”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/05/references_and.html a “post by Aaron Haspel”:http://www.godofthemachine.com/archives/00000608.html about the evils of poorly-done endnotes, and endnotes in general. This is something “John has written about”:http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2006/11/27/the-end-for-endnotes/ before, too. Endnotes really are a problem in scholarly books. In general, footnotes are better. Both are better than author-in-text citations (Healy 2006).

Haspel also arues that

2. Each endnote page should be headed by the page numbers of the notes it contains, to facilitate easy flipping. … 3. Notes should not be numbered. Numbers tax the reader needlessly, especially when they reach three figures. They should be marked by a symbol in the text … It would be especially helpful to use two symbols, to distinguish substantive comments from simple citations … 4. The notes must be indexed. … 5. The text should contain as little scholarly detritus as possible.

I agree with 2, disagree with 3 and also endorse 4 and 5. I used endnotes my own book, but did some work to keep the system friendly, especially for backreferences to works cited earlier in the text. The insane scholastic and legal conventions of _ibid_, _idem_ and _loc._ and _op. cit_ are especially to be avoided. I used a system where any work cited within a chapter was given a full reference in the notes, and then an abbreviated reference for any subsequent citations in that chapter (e.g., Quiggin, _I Hate Endnotes_).

I also did my bit to revive an older tradition, the analytic table of contents. Each chapter has a little paragraph summary on the Contents page, so that a casual reader can get a sense of the entire argument right away. Some libraries — like the Library of Congress — record tables of contents in their catalogs, so someone doing a search “can get that information”:http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip062/2005030538.html as well. I’d like to see more of this in other books.

Reading Jonathan Chait on the netroots and (belatedly) Off Center by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson,* it strikes me that the real political news of the last six months is the fact that the US now has a standard two-party system, arguably for the first time in its history. From Reconstruction until the final success of Nixon’s Southern strategy in the late 20th century, the fact that the Democratic Party represented the white establishment in the South made such a thing impossible. Under the primary system the two “parties” were little more than state-sanctioned institutional structures to ensure that voters (outside the South) got a choice of exactly two candidates.

From the 1970s onwards, though, this structure was obsolete. Having absorbed (and to some extent having been absorbed by) the white Southern establishment, the Republicans were clearly a party of the right, and started to act like one, requiring ideological unity and party discipline from its members, establishing a supporting apparatus of thinktanks and friendly media outlets and so on. As both Off Center and Chait observe in different ways, attempts by groups like the Democratic Leadership Council and the centrist media establishment to continue playing by the old rules simply ensured that the Republicans could win even when, on the issues, they were clearly pushing a minority position.

The netroots phenomenon is one reaction to this. But even more striking is the fact that the Democrats in Congress now match the kind of party discipline shown by the Republicans. After the 2006 elections, most commentary assumed that the party could not possibly hold together with its slender majorities in both houses, but they have clearly learned the basic dictum of party politics “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

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